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Court Cuts Gallery's Ties To Francis Bacon Estate

Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery that handled the artistic management of the British painter Francis Bacon for virtually his entire career, has had all association with his estate ended by England's High Court.

In a decision that has gone unreported until now, Justice David Edmund Neuberger ruled in late December that an executor of the multimillion-dollar estate who was a director of the gallery should be removed and replaced by a new independent representative.

The new trustee is Brian Clarke, 45, a well-known British architectural artist who was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards, 49, the painter's closest friend, to whom Bacon willed his entire estate. Bacon, widely accepted as the greatest British painter of his generation, died of a heart attack at the age of 82 in 1992.

Mr. Clarke had been responsible for shifting the representation of Bacon's works from Marlborough to Faggionato Fine Arts in London and the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, an arrangement that drew sudden attention last October when the Shafrazi Gallery mounted a show of 17 previously unseen Bacon paintings and photographs of his famously cluttered London studio. Marlborough's loss of the prestigious Bacon account and the reasons behind it became a subject of curiosity and speculation among contemporary art experts in London and New York.

They had become alert to possible problems when, on making their first inquiries to Marlborough London, Bacon's gallery since 1958, they were told that the Bacon paintings were being handled not in London but by Marlborough Liechtenstein.

The explanation set off alarms since the Liechtenstein office had been central to a scandal in New York in the 1970's over the estate of the American painter Mark Rothko that led to the ousting of executors; heavy fines against Marlborough; the conviction of its head, Frank Lloyd, for tampering with evidence and the end of its membership in the Art Dealers Association of America.

Liechtenstein is also known as a place that affords corporations high levels of secrecy and protection against demands for disclosure.

The Rothko case exposed sinister inner workings in the supposedly genteel art world and cost Marlborough its pre-eminence in contemporary art. Among other abuses, Marlborough was found to have sold paintings to favored clients at less than market value and to have collected inflated commissions.

Lawyers for the Bacon estate are busy in four European countries and the United States tracking assets that the estate believes should go to Mr. Edwards. "They are currently putting together a case that may at some point in the near future come to court," Mr. Clarke said.

His whole purpose, Mr. Clarke said, was to "get John everything that Francis left him."

The principal lawyer for the estate, John L. Eastman of New York, said in a telephone interview from St. Barts that "the defining question for the estate is what is there beyond what we already have." The argument presented to Justice Neuberger for the removal of Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough London, was that entrusting fiduciary responsibility to an official associated with the gallery whose actions were being examined by the estate presented a conflict of interest.

Neither Mr. Clarke nor Mr. Eastman would specify what activities of Ms. Beston's or the gallery's they had questioned.

Geoffrey Parton, a director of Marlborough London, said the gallery would not discuss any aspect of the Bacon estate. Mr. Parton said "no comment" six times during a brief telephone conversation on Monday, including to questions about whether Ms. Beston had been a Bacon trustee or was a director of the gallery. Court documents confirm that she was both.

There were originally two other trustees of the Bacon estate, Gilbert de Botton, a financier well known in art collecting circles who was a former director of Marlborough Zurich, and Dr. Paul Brass, Bacon's personal physician. Mr. de Botton never took up his commission, and Dr. Brass was replaced in the same Dec. 18 action that removed Ms. Beston. Dr. Brass, Mr. Clarke said, had acted "impeccably" but was simply overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the task.

Mr. Clarke and Mr. Eastman both resisted putting any value on the overall Bacon holdings. Individual paintings have fetched up to $6 million, prompting outsiders to estimate the worth of the whole estate at more than $100 million.

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The estate has paid its taxes and does not need to raise any money with sales of major works. "We may sell a number of pictures as time goes on, but we have no plans for any kind of big sale," Mr. Clarke said. "Not even a small sale, for that matter," he added.

Bacon's friends have found that the painter was even more prolific than they had known.

"Even though everybody thought that they'd been through the studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings dating from the 50's," Mr. Clarke said. "Since Francis died, I had been in his studio probably a hundred, a hundred and fifty times, and I had missed them. John Edwards had missed them."

The studio where Bacon worked for the last 30 years of his life was a giddy jumble of half-finished canvases, books, rags, drawings, notes, twisted paint tubes, encrusted brushes and broken furniture with bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling and smears of paint on the doors and walls. It occupied two rooms of a South Kensington mews house and is being disassembled, measured, catalogued and documented for reconstruction in Dublin, where Bacon was born and spent the first 16 years of his life.

It will be reassembled in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art for public show beginning in 2001. The dismantling has been done in archeological fashion, with highly detailed and enumerated placement charts so that the creative chaos that Bacon wrought in London can be precisely recreated in Dublin.

More Bacon works emerged when Barry Joule, 44, a Canadian writer who was one of the painter's neighbors, came forth with 500 oil sketches, drawings, and worked-on photographs from 1945 to 1965 that Mr. Bacon had given him.

There have been reports in the British press of disputes and threatened legal action between the estate and Mr. Joule, but Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Joule shared the estate's interest in abiding by the painter's wishes that Mr. Edwards receive everything.

He said that talks with him were "perfectly amicable." Mr. Joule agreed with that characterization, saying, "Things are being worked out in a friendly fashion."

Last year the Tate Gallery purchased 42 similar works on paper from the 1950's and 60's in gouache, oil paint, ink, ballpoint pen and pencil from Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock, friends of the artist, and the estate of Sir Stephen Spender. The works, compelling early visions of the twisted figures, blurred faces, screaming popes and butchered carcasses that were to become Bacon's signature repertory of postwar angst, are on display at the Tate until May 2.

Mr. Edwards, a reclusive and simple man currently living in Southeast Asia, was Bacon's closest friend for the last 16 years of his life. Born within the sounds of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church in East London and therefore a genuine Cockney, Mr. Edwards never learned to read or write and maintained a relationship with Bacon that friends described as filial.

Mr. Clarke said he became involved four years ago when Mr. Edwards approached him perplexed about delays and problems in dealing with the estate. "He asked if I would help him to try to understand why the estate was not being wound up, and he asked me to become his power of attorney. I thought it would be a very short thing, but after a while I discovered that there were, let's say, certain anomalies, problems without the resolution of which the estate could not be wound up."

Mr. Clarke took on the assignment without the knowledge of the executors, and when he found the task more daunting than he had anticipated, he turned to Mr. Eastman, a lawyer with broad experience in the worlds of art and entertainment. Mr. Eastman's sister, Linda, the wife of Sir Paul McCartney, had been a friend and collaborator of Mr. Clarke's, and the photographs of Bacon's studio that were displayed in New York last fall were the last pictures she shot before her death last April.

While he declined to get into the details of his preoccupation over Marlborough's management of Bacon, Mr. Clarke explained why he thought the painter's estate required special attention.

"Francis Bacon was famously disinterested and uninterested in money," he said. "He lived the life of an essentially simple man in a tiny bed-sit that was heated when very cold by leaving the gas door open. He had a tiny kitchen that contained an open bath, and a room with a bed and a chest of drawers.

"He was the last great existentialist. If you are an art gallery representing such a man whose chief legatee can neither read nor write and hasn't even had his own lawyer until recent years, your fiduciary obligations are all the greater because such a man could be described as 'easy pickings.' "